Eleanor Kingwell-Banham

Early rice agriculture in South Asia. Identifying
early cultivation systems using archaebotany.

Rice can be grown in many different agricultural systems. These include
flooded fields (sometimes known as paddy), rain fed fields and dry fields in
permanent or shifting systems. The nature in which staple crops, such as rice,
are grown is determined by/determines social organisation, seasonality and
mobility, settlement patterns, trade, technology and cultural development. This
project is the first systematic investigation into rice cultivation systems in
prehistoric South Asia.

Early rice in South Asia has been discovered in a variety of cultural
contexts, from large sedentary settlements in the Gangetic Plains to transient,
seasonal camps in the highlands of East India. Using macrobotanic and phytolith
evidence the cultivation systems employed at a variety of sites across South
Asia will be examined. These sites include Golbai Sasan, Orissa, a large
mounded settlement that spans the Neolithic to Chalcolithic periods and
Mangudi, Tamil Nadu, an aceramic low density megalithic site. In this way a
correlation between site types and cultivation systems can be established,
providing an initial framework for the development of rice cultivation systems
in South Asia.

Funding organisation

This
research is funded by NERC as part of the Early Rice Project, in addition archaeological
samples from Mantai, Sri Lanka, have been excavated and provided by the
Sealinks Project.

Conference Poster ”An Indian domestication of rice: the story from
Orissa, East India, and the development of rice cultivation systems.” International
Union for Quaternary Research, Bern, 2011; Rice and Language Across Asia,
Cornell University, 2011.

Conference
Poster “New analyses on the developments of early rice cultivation systems in
India.” International Work Group for Paleoethnobotany, Wilhelmshaven, 2010.